5 Things You Need To Know About Tyler Technologies’ CaseloadPro Buy

Buying Spree

Tyler Technologies continued its buying spree last week with the purchase of CaseloadPro. The local-government-centric solution provider already i well positioned in records management at courthouses and police departments, but less so in providing administrative software solutions to the post-conviction arena.

Salida, Calif.-based CaseloadPro has just 16 employees but it provides its Software-as-a-Service offering to 110 customers across 23 states and has 5,000 users, including Alameda County Probation in California, Clark County Juvenile Probation in Nevada, the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in Nevada, and the State of Nevada Juvenile Justice Department.

Tyler Technologies CFO Brian Miller told CRN the “tuck-in” purchase is one piece of creating the Tyler Alliance, a software suite that runs the gamut from 911 calls to post-conviction case management.

“We have this much broader vision of being able to make government more efficient, and so beyond just looking at the best system for probation or the best system for public safety you look at this overall vision that Tyler has, and what we’re doing with that data,” he said. “We’re bringing those solutions to government that no one else has.”

Buy, Rather Than Build

Prior to the purchase of CaseloadPro, Tyler Technologies already was equipped with case management software for probation officers through its Odessey Suite of products. However, Miller said, CaseloadPro is a much more robust offering than what Tyler Technologies had before.

“Our existing products, I’d say, were not as feature- and function-rich as CaseloadPro’s offering. So we have identified that as an area where we wanted to strengthen our offering. It was certainly a buy versus build opportunity, and we felt that CaseloadPro was a great acquisition candidate. It is a very strong product, deeper functionality than we have with our existing product. They have a really nice customer base. Even though they’re a small company, they’re not a startup. They have more than 100 clients, including some fairly large jurisdictions.”

The Tyler Alliance

Tyler Technologies, Plano, Texas, is No. 43 on the 2018 CRN Solution Provider 500 and considers itself a leader in courthouse administration, from file management to software aimed at probate courts that allows two parties to resolve civil matters at computer terminals without lawyers. Miller said the company also boasts front-line solutions for 911-dispatch and police officers, so probation was the next place the company wanted to turn.

“We look at the whole justice suite as an area that we want to be a leader in. In the case management space we are a pretty clear, if not dominant, leader and really just beyond the whole justice suite, but the whole public safety and justice process. So our acquisition of New World, going on three years ago, really expanded our presence in the public safety space. Our vision for what we call the Tyler Alliance is really to have a strong offering through the whole process, from a 911 call, through an incident, and arrest, a jailing, a trial, all the way to probation,” Miller said.

“We want to have strong products that work well as a suite and give us advantages over our competitors. As the only company that has that breadth of products, we also want to have products that are best of breed in each of those functional areas. CaseloadPro gives us that best-of-breed product in the probation area and strengthens our overall suite of courts and justice products.”

A $100 Million Opportunity

Tyler Technologies estimates that there is a $100 million market in providing digital case management solutions to probation departments nationwide. However, because it’s a unique market, and not easy to track, Miller said that number is probably conservative. He said the solution provider is expecting to transform systems that are old and outdated and replace them with new ones with mobile offerings for probation officers.

“There’s some automation there, but often it’s with a system that is maybe two or three generations behind. Many of these systems have been in use for 15, 20, 30 or more years. It could be a mainframe system that was custom-written in the ’70s. It could be a client/server system that they bought from a vendor, 20 or 25 years ago, and so technically, its automated, but it could be a homegrown system or a vendor who didn’t advance the product or keep up with technologies, so there isn’t a replacement product available from that existing vendor,” he said.

“Generally, we’re going to be taking a system from someone else who may no longer be competitive in the space. There are a number of different slices of the probation market. There’s a juvenile piece. There’s a pretrial release where it’s probation supervision, someone’s been arrested, they’re released on conditions that have to be tracked and monitored. Then there’s probation, post-incarceration release. From our estimation, the annual spend is north of $100 million dollars in that space. I’d say based on our best estimate that’s a conservative number, but it’s not like you can get a Gartner report on exactly what these sort of niche markets are,” Miller said.

Tucking In The Tuck-In

Tyler Technologies and CaseloadPro already have a common customer in the form of Clark County, Nevada. Miller said he is hoping to quickly integrate CaseloadPro’s capabilities throughout its suite of case management products.

“There certainly will be integration. I don’t know exactly what the timeline is, but we do expect to move quickly on that. We do have some common clients already. I’m not sure how tightly integrated our systems are today, but we will, I’d say over the next year or so, move forward with some pretty good out-of-the-box integration,” Miller said. “CaseloadPro will continue to do stand-alone deals with customers who don’t have other Tyler systems. I don’t know that we have a firm timeline for complete integration, but we’ll move quickly on providing additional integrations beyond what there are today.”

Leveraging Socrata To Keep Data Moving

To keep the probation software talking to other systems after Tyler Technologies comes in, Miller said the company is using one of its latest acquisitions, Socrata, an artificial intelligence-based data analytics tool that the company purchased in May.

“There are these multiple silos of data that exist in different systems in different departments and often in different jurisdictions; some of it is at the state level. Some is at the county level, some is at the city level. It creates problems with both accessing data, but also using that data to make good decisions, and also having conflicting data or having a good view into that data, particularly when you cross jurisdiction lines,” Miller said.

“Socrata, the acquisition we did earlier this year, is a big piece of that with their data as a service platform. It takes data that may reside in these multiple software silos and presents that both to the public and to users within the government in a usable format, an easily accessible format and provides the tools they need to analyze that,” he said.

“It’s really agnostic to the underlying data platform,” Miller added. “We believe as we said when we acquired Socrata that it applies, and sits on top of virtually every Tyler product as well as non-Tyler products and that is what it was built to do.”